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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Well, when you put it like that... yeah, I can totally see it. The Star Trek: the Next Generation movies never were my cup of tea, but I did feel like there was a pretty steady downward spiral in quality once they bucked the trend of even numbered movies being good. Generations was kind of forced and ended on what is arguably the worst pun in Star Trek history, but IMO First Contact is where the rot really set in. Star Trek makes a goddamn zombie movie. That was pretty evidently the point where ANY idea, no matter how stupid, would get a pass. I do appreciate that Jean-Luc Picard's inability to win a fistfight in any context continued to the bitter end, with him getting the snot kicked out of him by a clone of himself in a rainbow pleather onesie. De-lightful! I want to know where that damned pit IS. As big as the Sovereign-class is, there's no rational place to have a goddamn pit surrounded by bare metal rails. I know Starfleet doesn't have much time for OSHA, but still... Yeah, they've rationalized that as them being a variety of different sizes... the design apparently scales pretty well, and has held up for ages. The one area of inconsistency I wish they'd clear up is where the warp field coils are. The early Bird of Prey from Enterprise had a pair of dorsal nacelles, but I've seen stuff for the classic Bird of Prey claiming it has either a single warp nacelle internally along the centerline, or that the EPS feed to the wingtip disruptors also feeds warp coils in the surface of the wings. Remember those high gravity world aliens that spread the rumor that they were massively heavy to stop people picking them up? Physiologically, they're Stitch. It's right there in their description. (Hearing a Klingon quote Yoda was quite an experience in its own right.) Discovery looks like it's taking the Enterprise route... from what we've been told, the first episode or two are going to be a "nice job breaking it, hero" for the main character, which will lead to some kind of prolonged conflict with this new band of Klingon religious nuts. It's not completely terrible, but it doesn't really feel like Star Trek anymore.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It's completely insane, really... some nutter looked at the ensign whose only noteworthy deed in a Star Trek teleplay was to spill hot chocolate on Captain Picard and said "this is main character fodder". (No I am not joking, she's the XO of the USS Da Vinci in the Star Trek: Corps of Engineers series.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    's it just me, or does Gloval look like a grown up XBox Kid?
  4. Seto Kaiba
    ... and you felt the need to inflict haemolacria on the rest of us?
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Even letting them stumble across a relatively small population like an emigrant fleet would be an enormous problem, hence the drastic measures taken in securing the advance of emigrant fleets using stealth vessels. (Master File alleges that there are still cases where rogue Zentradi elements stumble onto and overwhelm colonies. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur gives an example in a planet named Supika III, which was settled by an early emigrant fleet mission and was overwhelmed swiftly by a small Zentradi fleet that chanced upon them despite the best efforts of their eighty or so ships and ~600 3rd Generation VFs.) From what we've been told by Kawamori and co. in interviews (it may have been Otona Anime #9), the Zentradi Army doesn't exactly encourage curiosity among the troops... and that's probably a big part of why encounters with the Zentradi are so infrequent. The example given was fold faults... as the Zentradi are aware of them in a rudimentary sense, but because they don't fall into the category of "ally" or "enemy" they're ignored. The Vrlitwhai branch fleet only found the Sol system because they were on search and destroy ops and just happened to be in the right place at the right time to detect the residual gravity waves the defolding Supervision Army gun destroyer had made ten years previously. They only bothered with the Sol system because they saw evidence of an enemy ship. I'm torn between three potential theories as to why the Zentradi Army doesn't seem to notice that there's a galaxy-spanning communications network in place: The Galaxy Network is using fold communications frequencies that are unmonitored by the Zentradi Army... a. ... because those frequencies are not supported by Zentradi communications hardware. b. ... because those frequencies are not military frequencies monitored by the Zentradi. c. ... because those frequencies are ones the ancient Protoculture formerly reserved for their own military or civilian communications networks, and the Zentradi were given orders not to monitor or interfere with them. The Galaxy Network is using some kind of fold wave beamforming technology to provide a tight-beam transmission channel instead of an all-around broadcast, making itself harder to detect outside of the path of the beam. The Galaxy Network is using Zentradi frequencies, so the network traffic is simply missed by the Zentradi comms officers... a. ... because the transmission formats are not supported by Zentradi Army communications hardware, meaning it's unintelligible gibberish to them and is thus mistaken for malfunctions or interference. b. ... because the transmissions are encrypted, and are being mistaken for normal Zentradi Army strategic communications traffic. I suspect the truth is somewhere between 1b and 1c, possibly with a little bit of 2 and 3a thrown in. Believe me, you aren't alone... I may have it worse here, since I'm a network engineer.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, taste is highly subjective... but you've certainly taken a level or two in "eccentric", being the first person I've seen admit to actually liking those books. Most Trek fans I know who've actually read them tend to be (what's a nice way to put it?) "unsatisfied" with them. I'm not sure I could call myself a purist with a straight face, since I grew up on a steady diet of all things Star Trek. Both of my parents are Trekkies, and they reckoned Trek was more wholesome than what other kids my age were watching and reading regularly. (I grew up in the Dark Age of Comic Books, when Liefeldian ultraviolence and terrible "bad girl" comics, so in hindsight I almost want to admit there was some wisdom in their decision.) I had a pretty steady diet of Star Trek's novels, comic books, etc. back then. Pocket Books' Star Trek: the Next Generation series of light novels was more hit than miss, IMO, but there was also a fair amount of genuine garbage mixed into what I got (e.g. The Return, Q-Squared.) I even had bootlegs of the old Star Trek cartoon. The problem I've got with a lot of the modern Star Trek Expanded Universe is that most of what's been written reads, IMO, like the very worst kind of fan-fiction. (That hasn't actually stopped me from buying and reading most of it, but still...) So much of it is just incredibly lazy writing. Most of the writers don't seem to want to develop new characters or let go of existing ones, so every EU series falls into the same rut as the Star Wars EU almost immediately. No character is ever allowed to retire, or fade from the spotlight, or live out a life in peace after their series-specific story arc ended. Even death doesn't spare them from being dragged back for abuse by the EU authors. It's the perennial "Enterprise is the only ship in range" problem writ small. No event of import is seemingly permitted to happen without an established character or five at the center of it, even if it makes no sense that they would be. Even nameless background characters who never had any dialog are suddenly of vital galactic import. Take, for instance, the DS9 Relaunch novels: Star Trek: Titan is just as bad in many senses... That'd be a nice touch, I think... as long as they didn't change gears the way Enterprise did with an inexplicable war arc because they felt it wasn't action-packed enough.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    At least they managed to sell the new Romulans pretty easily... if you want an alien race to seem quietly menacing in a "don't rush me, I'm deciding where the best place to stick the knife" sort of way right away you cast Marc Alaimo as their representative. As explanations go, I'm not sure it's really enough to justify the sudden and enormous shift in their overall design aesthetic. Isolated religious minority or not, these are still supposed to be the Prime continuity's Klingons, so it makes no sense for them to look like a cross between the Kelvin 'verse's Klingons and that complete prat Krall from Star Trek Beyond. The different taste in armor and starship designs can be justified easily enough, especially since it's implied by the makeup team that the Discovery Klingons belong to some kind of rogue, isolationist Great House that we've never seen before. It's been down since about halfway through TNG that the Imperial Klingon Defense Force's procurement isn't through common channels, but rather that the individual Great Houses all maintain their own separate supply chains and shipyards, and they aren't always singing from the same psalter even in starship design.1 So on that note it's certainly believable that this rogue Klingon group might have its own unique ships and armor.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Having grown up with TNG and later shows, I did find it interesting that the Klingons and Romulans seem to have switched stereotype hats in the creators notes around the time TNG got rolling. Roddenberry's notes from TOS describe the Klingons as being the untrustworthy habitual schemers and the Romulans as the mildly admirable honor-obsessed militaristic ones. Seems like Star Trek III: the Search for Spock was the last hurrah for the underhanded Klingons and from then on it was the Romulans who became the compulsive backstabbers and the Klingons became Mr. Honor-before-Reason. Makes you wonder what's going to be the deal with this new batch of Klingons in Discovery... the released information seems to suggest they're an isolated religious minority in the Klingon Empire like the Klingon pilgrims from the Voyager episode "Prophecy". Considering the claims that this is modern allegory, that probably won't be anywhere near as benign as the ones in "Prophecy" were. Since they're trying to upset Klingon tropes, I wonder if this is their return to scheming Klingons?
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, having read The Making of Star Trek I can attest that the Klingons were never conceived as a one-dimensional antagonist... from the start, they were an allegory for the Russians, while ducking most of the "evil Russians" tropes that normally would make for a one-dimensional antagonist.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Being one-dimensional space dinosaurs, I'll only accept a return from the Gorn if the ambassador to their homeworld is played by Chris Pratt. ... ... ... please tell me you're joking.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Look no further than the artist's DeviantArt page for the reason why... He originally drew it as a Macross: Do You Remember Love? piece, and was paid to redraw it as a Robotech one for the comic.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    An enemy in Star Trek doesn't even necessarily need to be a full-on strategic rival for the United Federation of Planets, a clever or determined foe can do an awful lot... like how the crippled and nearly bankrupt House of Duras managed to bring down Starfleet's flagship with a painfully obsolete D12-class Bird of Prey, or how one traitor managed to help the criminally inept and stupid Kazon seize Voyager. Star Trek's prime continuity has just held onto the conflict ball too often, and for too long, and now they don't have a credible antagonist left unless they resort to serial escalation the way those relaunch novels did where desperate writers made a kind of bad guys federation called the Typhon Pact out of all the one-time villains and absent antagonists that've cropped up in previous shows like the Breen, Gorn, Tholians, and Tzenkethi. Unless they go extragalactic or bring back some vanished power like the Iconians, they're kinda hosed for menace. Yeah, for my money that's one of the things that made Enterprise such a bore... for the entire third season exploration, diplomacy, and allegory took a powder so Jonathan Archer and his crew could rampage around the Delphic Expanse with their freshly upgunned NX-class ship to blast the crap out of everyone from the House of Duras to the various flavors of Xindi. They abandoned the spirit of Star Trek in favor of doing a vaguely Star Trek-themed version of Die Hard complete with Archer dropping the bad guy off a tower at the end. After that, trying to return to the old Star Trek formula just felt incredibly forced. Like, OK Captain Archer's murder-tantrum is over now let's get back to space exploration and forget about the people that he marooned in deep space and/or killed. (Unless, as Daniels suggested, it all un-happened once he killed Vosk and the timeline reset itself.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Funnily enough... they DID get around to it. (Just, presumably, not back then.) Star Trek: the Next Generation had mention in materials provided to its writers that the Galaxy-class's cartographic staff included a pair of orcas and a small pod of dolphins, who were kept in the Cetacean Ops lab in the saucer section. They were apparently considered full members of the ship's science staff. (The existence of the lab and the animals in it is mentioned in passing twice in the series, once in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and once in "The Perfect Mate". It was also in a line in "Relics" that was modified to address the holodeck instead.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Star Trek is a fantastic example of it... reams and reams of technical detail go into developing the setting, most of which never come up except as part of lists of THOU SHALT NOTs that the writers are expected to comply with. 99.9% of this technical material being developed for Macross never shows up or is even mentioned in the shows, it's entirely for the consumption of the fans and guidance for the animators about what a mecha can or can't do.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Whoops, sorry... the way I phrased that is hideously unclear. I really shouldn't write when I'm three sheets to the wind on antihistamines. What I meant is that, individually, the Zentradi don't have any mecha able to rival a 5th Generation VF and an emigrant fleet has the firepower to handle anything up to about the branch fleet level via superweapons like the Battle-class's Macross Cannon and their arsenals of thermonuclear reaction weapons... but a Zentradi Army main fleet has such an overwhelming advantage of numbers that those individual advantages are all but meaningless and the only real option an emigrant fleet has is to avoid detection. In short, if it came to a fight between an emigrant fleet with 5th Generation VFs and a Zentradi Main Fleet, the New UN Spacy would reap a fearful talley from the Zentradi before being overwhelmed in short order because the Zentradi outnumber them by several orders of magnitude. A fleet like Chlore's, which has over ten thousand ships, is a bit big for a fleet as small as the 37th Large-Scale Emigrant Fleet to tackle... but probably wouldn't be as big a threat for one of the larger emigrant fleets like Macross Frontier or Macross Valiant, the latter of which allegedly has over 900 ships on its own. The (New) UN Spacy's defenses seem to be largely structured around the expectation of fighting a Zentradi force of roughly branch fleet scale (~1,100 ships). The former Varauta system defense flagship (Gepernich's ship) was built to table a branch fleet more or less singlehandedly through overwhelming firepower.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, remember it's explained in series that the "humans were created by ancient aliens" thing is considered a crackpot theory only really taken seriously by a handful of anthropologists and researchers like Dr. Hasford and Dr. Turner. Even if the Birdhuman incident hadn't been classified top secret, having an alien ambassador tell you point-blank that that particular crackpot theory was gospel truth would've been a profound shock for the UN Government.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if I wasn't going to avoid the show like the plague before... I sure as hell am NOW. There's nothing that says "drooling incompetence" quite as much as the producing saying "we know what the essence of Star Trek is, but we're shelving it because having characters on the same side constantly yell at each other is more dramatic". The simple fact that they're surprised that the established fanbase is pissed about the massive departures from canon shows that they didn't learn a damn thing from the failure of Star Trek: Enterprise either. Fans were OK with a prequel as long as the timeline isn't being dicked with, and Enterprise went well out of its way to make dicking with the timeline something that underpins the entire plot. If Enterprise was the actual Titanic, hitting an iceberg because its crew wasn't paying proper attention, then the Discovery series seems to be more like the starliner Titanic from Futurama, jackknifing from hazard to hazard for no reason beyond the ineptitude of the people in charge. I can only hope that this show meets with an early end so it doesn't have a chance to inflict much collateral damage on competently-made Star Trek. After Voyager, the TNG movies, and the jumping-off point for the Abrams movies, I'm pretty convinced the Prime continuity is unviable now. There's no credible antagonist left, which is why it seems like every non-canon Star Trek title seems to think the only recourse is for the Klingons to withdraw from the Khitomer Accords again. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine established the Gamma Quadrant's one major power was the Dominion, and when it went down it took almost every credible Alpha and Beta quadrant antagonist with it. The Cardassian Union took one on the chin no less than six times in the series: they lost Bajor to the Bajoran rebels, they lost whole planets to the Maquis, the Obsidian Order walked blithely into a Dominion trap and was wiped out, the Klingons invaded, then the Alliance invaded, and their allies began decimating them when they switched sides at the end. The Romulan Star Empire lost most of the Tal Shiar in the same fool's errand that the Obsidian Order perished in, then lost a huge chunk of its fleet in the ensuing war, the entire senate was assassinated in one go by a single intelligence operative, and then they lost a good chunk of their territory to a botched illegal subspace weapons test that destroyed Romulus. The Klingon Empire wound up taking a beating against the Cardassian Union thanks to Federation intervention, then another one when they declared war on the Federation, then a third beating when they joined with the Federation to fight the Dominion. The Breen lost a good chunk of their fleet siding with the Dominion. The Maquis were wiped out by the Dominion. Voyager stepped in and took a whack at the last credible established antagonist, putting the Borg Collective through a humiliation conga that ended with the near-destruction of the collective, the death of the Borg Queen, and the loss of their transwarp network. That aside, they encountered and neutered Species 8472, the only other serious threat they encountered. Everyone else they found was largely outmatched by the technology of a relatively lightly armed Federation science ship. The Kazon and Vidiians were never a serious threat to a properly equipped ship, and they couldn't find a recurring antagonist after that except the Borg. The only faction left standing when the dust settled was the Federation, who not only came out with the least casualties in the Dominion War but also beat the Borg and now have future tech toys from Admiral Janeway's temporal shenanigans. Who's left, besides the conspirators in the Temporal Cold War plot that Enterprise did such a poor job with? Most of them are established to be less advanced than the Federation's own Starfleet temporal agents. Even Future Guy, the Sphere Builders, and the Na'kuhl didn't really have the muscle to match Starfleet. They wrote themselves into a corner, so I wouldn't be opposed to a reboot if it were actually well written. Discovery... isn't, as far as we can tell.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's pretty easy for me to get distracted by it sometimes too... especially considering the sheer amount of detail Kawamori and Chiba pour into the mecha, which goes way beyond just about every other mecha series I've worked on translations for. Make no mistake, even if Macross is truly a love story first and mecha series second, the mecha are themselves a labor of love for the creative staff. (Mind you, I'm pretty darn sure the Zentradi Army monstrously outnumbers and outguns the Galactic Empire... I've never really found another sci-fi series where there is an antagonist that has THAT kind of manpower behind it, with billions of ships and tens of trillions of clone soldiers. It really drives home how a pangalactic civilization could be wiped out in the space of just a couple years, when you have clone armies that large fighting.) I doubt it. Kawamori's never been one for that kind of allegory, and his Aesops are usually delivered with all the subtlety of a half-brick to the head (e.g. Macross Dynamite 7's "save the whales"). (Plus, usually when there ARE World War II allegorical links being drawn in anime, the Japanese or ersatz-Japanese characters always seem to land on the Allies' side. The original Mobile Suit Gundam is an incredibly blatant example of this, with Japan and the Japanese characters explicitly on the Federation side and Zeon being essentially just "Space Nazi Germany". In a few titles I know of where characters somehow end up sent back in time to World War II, it usually takes the form of "the folly of our ancestors" with the characters attempting to stay out of the war for fear that if they intervened Japan wouldn't be able to throw off its imperialism, etc.) IMO, the love triangle in Macross Delta suffered from the same problem the one in Macross Frontier did: it was incredibly one-sided. Like Ranka in the TV series, Mirage was marginalized by her opposite number to the extent that she never really got any time with the main character that wasn't about the other girl to some extent. The characters were interesting, but from about the fourth or fifth episode it was incredibly obvious that Mirage was not going to win that the love triangle was almost in-name-only. Like Sheryl, Freyja got all the screen time, all the character development, and all the alone time with the protagonist while the other only really managed "clingy jealous girl" and "can't spit it out".
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The aircraft designs are, as we know, his personal passion... but Macross has always revolved around the love story first and foremost. The war, and the characters involvement in it, always serves mainly to advance the love story. It's not like Macross is the only series where parts of the audience miss the forest for the trees. Star Trek has that perennial problem where its audience misses the allegory and social commentary that were the main reason for its existence because they're distracted by the sci-fi shiny bits. (I'm frequently guilty of that myself.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    That's one reason among many that You-Know-Who's proposal for a live-action film will almost certainly never be actioned for production... it's practically begging for a copyright infringement lawsuit by any standard, and it's damn near impossible to determine how far is "far enough" in distancing a project like that from source material they can't legally use. (That's not to say studios don't sometimes do dumb things like proceeding with films that will obviously get them sued... e.g. Halle Berry's Catwoman... but it is a relative rarity.) The Show That Must Not Be Named did it well before then, in actual fact. It was implied back in their adaptation of MOSPEADA, but in the first episode of their canceled OVA they avoided even using the word "Zentradi". They're very much aware of the limitations on what they can use, legally speaking, and it has dominated their creative process since the very beginning (per the remarks of Mr. Macek at a convention in 1995.) Several thousand, yes. According to Records Officer Exsedol Folmo, there are somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Main Fleets operating in the Milky Way. There were, according to Macross Chronicle, once approximately 5,000 such fleets. They vary somewhat in size, ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of ships per Macross Chronicle. Chlore's fleet was, IIRC, only tens of thousands of ships in Macross 7. She was likely a Direct Defense Fleet commander, since the Macross 7 series treats the SDF Macross version of the war as the more accurate one WRT factions and continuity. Available setting materials suggest that encounters with rogue Zentradi branch fleets occur fairly often and even the occasional skirmish with main fleet-scale forces isn't unheard-of. The rogue fleets don't seem to be regarded as a significant threat, and are generally either destroyed through superior firepower or exposed to Earth culture. It's suggested that main fleets are avoided at all costs, since the amount of firepower necessary to repel one is outside the scope of what an emigrant fleet can provide. (This is probably one of the things that keeps the Federal New UN Forces too busy to intervene in inter-colony squabbles.) It wouldn't really be a new development, story-wise... the Macross II: Lovers Again chronology has it happen with distressing regularity, and by 2092 the UN Spacy there had repelled at least four more main fleets after the Boddole Zer and Laplamiz ones in 2009-2010. They'd gotten VERY good at it, which is one of the reasons they had become so complacent by the time the Mardook showed up. I think a main continuity emigrant fleet encountering a main fleet wouldn't be much of a fight, regardless. If they were armed with 5th Generation VFs the Zentradi don't have anything that can really rival that, and the fleet would get wiped out if it tried to go head-to-head with anything much larger than a branch fleet. (This is why, in Master File's accounts, the military will sacrifice and even self-destruct ships to avoid having main fleets discover the location of emigrant fleets.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    If you were to ask Kawamori, he'd tell you flat out that the focus has never been on mecha and battles. As he would, and has, put it the focus of Macross has always been on the love story. All that stuff with space battles and transforming fighters is just an expansive backdrop for the all-important romance to play out on.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The annoying thing about that is the fact that the obligation to have a Jenius in every Macross series combined with the apparent limit of one Token Girl Teammate means that if you want the gals in the cast to actually DO something besides sing from the sidelines your only option is the Jenius du jour. I appreciate that the damsel in distress is a classic storytelling technique, and Japan loves its barrier maiden trope, but I'd personally like to see this setting, in which the Zentradi have all-female elite forces, cough up a few more female pilots. The (New) UN Forces doesn't bar women from frontline combat service, so where are they? The Macross II: Lovers Again OVA and its prequels didn't seem to have a problem with it, and the light novels, manga, and video games that've been made for Kawamori's chronology have cheerfully included loads of 'em, but the animation seems reluctant to include them.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... y'know how artists are sometimes embarrassed of their early works? That's how I feel about those early translations of mine from ~2002. My grasp of the language was still pretty basic, I'd only managed to lay hands on a few Japanese publications, and the effort was mainly a bid to correct the more obvious errors in the Macross II RPG series published by Palladium Books. It made for great practice, though, since the more I learned the more the errors became obvious ones, necessitating more research. By the time I was done I'd moved on to my first self-run site, the ratio of red ink to original text in those books was probably four or five to one, and my players were about ready to wring my neck for constantly fiddling with the stats to make them more accurate. Most of the questions that I spent weeks working on answers for back then would barely merit asking in this thread these days.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's why I wasn't willing to commit to that one as still viable... some bits of Star Trek: the Animated Series fit pretty well without any finessing like the Constitution-class pre-refit USS Enterprise having a sort of proto-holodeck, while others fit rather less well like the life support/personal forcefield belts, automatic bridge defense system, or that 1:1 scale inflatable USS Enterprise decoy deployed from the shuttlebay. I know Star Trek Online isn't canon, so its use of them isn't exactly a fair indicator. (Still, the automatic bridge defense system would've made Starfleet security's job SO. MUCH. EASIER. if it hadn't been abandoned. Aliens beam in and take over the bridge? Let a huge automated phaser turret sort 'em out.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Hong Kong dollars... so it's not as ruinous as it looks, but it's still pretty steep at about $770 US plus shipping (with a $320 deposit).
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